Seth Keen

opening-session-friday-january-18/
video-aesthetics-short-essay/
tal-sterngast-karasek-speaks-the-asthetics-of-videoblogging/
thomas-elsaesser-on-constructive-instability/
jan-simons-on-the-narrative-of-tagging/
dan-oki-cinema-as-research-database/
alternative-platforms-and-software/
participatory-culture/
video-vortex-curating-online-video/

videovortex flickr photos

Tom Sherman opening presentation


The venue


Alternative Platforms and Software session

Photos on flickr of the workshop taken by Malka at montevideo.

The vlogging workshop went really well at Montevideo in Amsterdam as part of the Video Vortex II exhibition. There was a lively response from the participants towards the videodefunct project. The videodefunct 2-hour presentation went quickly, with a lot of conversation and debate. Jay and Ryanne’s presentation of showinthebox was excellent and tied in really well with many of the points raised in the videodefunct project. The panel session at the end concluded with Geert posing a question on the relationship between the development of WordPress in relation to search functionality. A question influenced by Anne Helmond’s current postgraduate research. It was great to have Laurene’s help and Malka at montevideo helped make the event run really smoothly.

Geert interviewed for video vortex the Paper Tiger TV video activist DeeDee HallecK on YouTube and online video. The iv is titled Video Surfdom–Three Questions for DeeDee Halleck.

Tank TV have brought together with the curator Ian White, The Whole World exhibition.

A selection of artists’ film and video that feature lists or different kinds of taxonomies – visual, audio or textual – are presented as an online exhibition of extracts. Works by Dalia Neis, Uriel Orlow, Jean-Gabirel Périot, Michael Robinson and Valerie Tevere take as their subject such wildly diverse lists as depictions of saints, everything on Ebay, magazine advertising, our mediated world, protest, violence and war, the pages of National Geographic magazine and the words spoken by people on the streets of New York. Text scrolls across the screen, images flash past, immersive landscapes ultimately disintegrate. Many things are logged and something is undone.

Steve Erickson is releasing a new book Zeroville.Steven Shaviro wrote a blog entry about the book .

The transmission network put out their final publicity for their event VX:transmission that coincides with the VV conference.

VX:mission will look at how distribution of Social Justice Video is happening using Free and Open Source technology. It is a chance to find out about existing distribution projects, get feedback for your own projects or ideas, find collaborators and scheme about how best to distribute your video.

Associated organisations are FlossManuals.net and clearerchannel.org. Included is a demonstration of http://if iwatch.tv

I have been organising a vlogging workshop/presentation at Montevideo in Amsterdam. A summary of the workshop came together today.

Videodefunct and Showinabox: Hitting vlogging with a hammer
date: Thursday Jan 17 from 12.00 – 17.00
place: Workspace in the Netherlands Media Art Institute, Keizersgracht 264 Amsterdam

A workshop presented in two parts that looks at knocking vlogging into shape and bashing it into oblivion. The videodefunct collective focus on poetic approaches towards the way video is presented and curated by inverting the blog interface. Showinthebox aim to improve vlogging accessibility and aesthetic control with a user-friendly toolkit. Both projects use the open source blogging application WordPress and question whether vlogs need to move beyond the constraints of blogs.

1200 – 1400 Videodefunct (Keith Deverell and Seth Keen)
1400 – 1600 Showinthebox (Jay Dedman & Ryanne Hodson)
1600 – 1700 Vlogging panel discussion

links

http://greyspace.com.au/blog/
http://keithdeverell.net
http://www.videodefunct.net/
http://www.videodefunct.net/pedestrian/player/
http://www.videodefunct.net/theInvertedPedestrian/
http://www.videodefunct.net/banter
http://www.videodefunct.net/theDrunkenTruth/

I also had a close look at the opening 24/7 a DIY Video Summit, video clip (that ironically has no poster/thumbnail/preview image as it downloads when the web page is opened). The clip a vox-pox of grabs from speakers and artists attending the event provides an insight into what to expect. Following is links to some of the organisations and people featured in the opening clip. Interesting that remixing as an approach features in many of the videos selected. In the publicity information provided in an interview with the summit co-chair Mimo Ito there is a focus on remixing:

One of the most interesting aspects of online video sharing is the fact that videos are created in an almost conversational mode, where one video is a commentary on or a response to another video, and so on. We see this kind of video and response sequence with popular remix source footage…

As part of selecting these works, curating as a practice is a feature at the summit. Links provided in the introduction video:

Anne Bray (Executive Director) – freewaves.org an alternative exhibition platform

sacha costanza chock who is involved with http://video.indymedia.org/

The Goal and Idea of the Video Network is the distribution of High Quality Videos (vhs/dvd quality) over the Internet. It is based on the Open Publishing principle of Indymedia and will allow the Publishing of Copyright Free Videos under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License.

eric saks who runs an “alternative cinema” site called flicker He says his aim with his work is to subvert “pop culture”, mainstream approaches towards audiovisual media.

Jonathan McIntosh media artist, activist who is building a website called rebellious pixels. These could be described as activist orientated re-mixes of adverts and news.

tim park doki doki productionshttp://www.doki.ca/ Anime remixes that use text to subvert the message.

laura shapiro whose thing is vidding. From wikipedia:

Vidding is the practice of creating fan-made music videos (sometimes called songvids or fanvids) that edit clips from favorite TV shows, anime series, movies, or even official music videos, to another song. It is a cross between narrative story-telling and visual poetry and their content can range from a simple tribute to a favorite character or delve into shipping/slash.

Paul Marino Thinking Machinima blog

I took a closer look at the 24/7 a DIY Video Summit which is scheduled to take place a few weeks after the Video Vortex event. Both conferences reflect the current relevance of online video. The overview for the 24/7 summit focuses on examining ways to maintain the production and distribution of online video and aims to cater for a broad range of content producers from do-it-yourself through to professional, with the objective to get “grassroots” producers involved in discussions on where online video is heading.

We are in the early stages of a fundamental transformation in how we create, share and view dynamic visual media. This transformation is enabling a new media ecology that can support widespread amateur video creation, and peer-to-peer and many-to-many distribution to audiences both large and small. Although it is clear that there is tremendous demand for user-generated and bottom-up forms of digital video, it remains unclear how best to support these creative projects, what the implications are for artistic practice and how to build bridges between old and new media.

Following the broad objective of the event there are representatives from activists, academics, curators, media producers through to commercial providers including some of the larger video websites. The event supported by the Institute of Multimedia Literacy, School of Cinematic Arts, University of Southern California from what I can tell tends to be US centric. The panel presentations/discussions cover four broad themes research; artistic practice; intellectual property/copyright; Tools (both non-comerrcial and commercial) with discussion on “ad-revenue sharing”.

The IP/copyright questions being asked:

Are the legal risks of DIY media–copyright infringement from remix and appropriation, aggressive licensing demands by rightsholders, and the like–silencing vibrant voices? On the other side, can intellectual property, always intended as an incentive for production, work for DIY artists?

Overall, the ‘summit’ seems to provide another platform that supports an alternative perspective on what is described in the 24/7 publicity as a “revolution” that is similar in scale and ubiquity to blogging.